Archive for the ‘Two-party system’ Category

By the time of the U.S. presidential election in November 2020, historical experience and the condition of global money markets suggest that the current global economic boom will probably have run its course. While the latest government economic figures show the current boom continuing in the United States and Europe, serious crises have already hit the currencies of Argentina and Turkey.

The dollar after a period of weakness has begun rising against the euro and other currencies and against gold. This sudden dollar strength is not only the result of rising U.S. interest rates. Trump’s threat to impose high tariffs on a whole range of commodities starting on July 6 has set off a flight into the dollar due to its role as the international means of payment. We have seen many such flights into the dollar over the years whenever a crisis threatens, whether political, military or economic.

If no compromise is reached by July 6 and Trump’s tariffs – and the retaliatory tariffs of competing nations – go into effect, it is possible that some commodity sales will fall through, which could trigger an international credit crisis. If severe enough, such a crisis would quickly throw the global capitalist economy into recession. This is all the more likely given the very late stage in the current industrial cycle, which has made the global credit system increasingly fragile even in the absence of a trade war. Whatever happens in the short run, Trump’s economic nationalist “America First” policies are undermining the entire world order that has prevailed since 1945. But that is the subject for another post.

Because capitalist economic crises tend to manifest themselves first in the spheres of currency and then credit, many reformers have sought cures for crises through reforms to the currency and credit systems. This creates the illusion in the minds of middle-class reformers, who stand between the two main class camps of modern society, the capitalist class and the working class, that the contradictions of capitalist society can be overcome through reforming the credit/monetary system. The U.S., in particular, has produced numerous monetary reform movements.

The year 2016 marks the centenary of V.I. Lenin’s famous pamphlet “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism,” subtitled “A Popular Outline.” The pamphlet has immensely influenced politics of the last century. This is largely but not only because the author the following year became the leader of the first socialist revolution as well as chief inspirer and de facto leader of the Third (Communist) International—also known as the Comintern. If Lenin had not led the first socialist revolution and/or had not lived to found the Third International, the pamphlet would still have had considerable influence but of course not the influence it has had.

A century after Lenin’s “Imperialism” appeared, Monthly Review Press published “Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century,” by the British Marxist John Smith. As the title indicates, this book aims to do for the Marxist analysis of imperialism in our new century what Lenin’s “Imperialism” did for the last. Smith holds against innumerable critics that Lenin’s basic thesis was not only correct for its own time but also for our own, at least in broad outline.

But Smith’s book is more ambitious than that, and this is what attracted the interest of this blog. Smith is not entirely satisfied with Lenin’s work, which in the Third International, and the more loosely organized international Communist movement that continued after the Third International was dissolved in 1943, was often treated as virtually on a par with Marx’s “Capital.” Smith is dissatisfied with Lenin’s classic pamphlet because, unlike Marx in “Capital,” Lenin does not directly apply value theory. Value analysis is implicit rather than explicit as it is in “Capital.”

Smith in his “Imperialism” attempts to accomplish two tasks. One, he attempts to update Lenin’s “Imperialism.” More ambitiously, he attempts to “complete” Lenin’s work, bringing it into line with Marx’s “Capital,” first published 150 years ago this year. Smith explicitly puts value analysis at the center of his analysis of modern imperialism.

This article will come in two parts. This month, I examine policies of the Federal Reserve and Trump’s domestic policies. Next month, I will end this series with an examination of Trump’s global economic policies.

The Federal Reserve and Donald Trump

On December 14, 2016, the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee announced that it had finally decided to raise the federal funds rate—the rate that commercial banks, not the Fed itself, charge each other for overnight loans—by a quarter of one percent. Instead of targeting a rate of 0.25 to 0.50 percent like it did between December 2015 and December 2016, its new target is 0.50 to 0.75 percent.

Since Trump’s victory on November 8, long-term interest rates have risen sharply. This combined with the decision of the Fed to finally nudge up the fed funds rate indicates that the money market has tightened since Trump’s election. In the course of the industrial cycle, once the money market starts to tighten it is only a matter of time before recession arrives. The recession marks the end of one industrial cycle and the beginning of the next.

As it became increasingly likely that Trump could actually win the Republican nomination, the Fed put on hold its earlier plans to raise the fed funds rate multiple times in the course of 2016. The normal practice is for the Federal Reserve System to raise the fed funds rate repeatedly in the later stages of the industrial cycle. Indeed, this is central banking 101. These policies are designed to hold in check credit-fueled “over-trading” (overproduction), as well as stock market, land and primary-commodity speculation that can end in a crash with nasty consequences.

If the central bank resists raising interest rates too long by flooding the banking system with newly created currency, this leads sooner or later to a run on the currency, which is what happened in the 1970s. The result back then was stagflation and deep recessions with interest rates eventually rising into the double digits, which effectively wiped out the profit of enterprise—defined as the difference between the total profit and the rate of interest. At the end of the stagflation in the early 1980s came the explosion of credit, sometimes called “financialization,” the aftereffects of which are still with us today.

Under the present dollar-centered international monetary system, the repeated failure of the Federal Reserve System to push up interest rates would lead to the collapse of the U.S. dollar and the dollar system. The inevitable result would be a financial crash and thus the military and political crash of the U.S. world empire, which has held the capitalist world together since 1945.

In this cycle, however, the Federal Reserve waited more than eight years after the outbreak of the crisis in August 2007 before it began to push up the federal funds rate. The reason for the prolonged delay is that the current U.S. economic expansion, which began in 2009—representing the rising phase of the current industrial cycle—has been the slowest on record.

During this extraordinarily feeble expansion, the U.S. GDP has grown, with some fluctuations, at a rate of only about 2 percent a year. This performance contrasts sharply with the double-digit U.S. GDP rates of growth that occurred during the expansion of 1933-1937 and again after the severe but brief recession of 1937-1938 during the Great Depression. Far more than in the 1930s, the current era has been marked by “secular stagnation” in the U.S. as well as Europe and Japan.

Beginning with the panic that broke out with the failure of the giant Lehman Brothers investment bank in September 2008, the Federal Reserve engineered an explosion in the dollar-denominated monetary base designed to stave off a new super-crisis that could have been much worse than the one in 1929-1933. This effort succeeded in preventing the crisis from reaching the extremes the earlier super-crisis did in most countries—but not all. For example, the crisis/depression that began in the U.S. in 2007 has been far worse in Greece than the crisis of the 1930s was in that country. But even in countries where a full-scale repeat of the 1930s Depression was avoided, the post-crisis stagnation has been far more stubborn than anything seen in the 1930s.

Donald J. Trump, the 70-year-old New York billionaire, real-estate magnate, owner of casinos and golf courses, and former clownish reality star, is the new political chief of the United States and leader of the “free world” (as the U.S. world empire likes to call itself).

Trump was actually defeated by a margin of 2.3 million votes in the election by Hillary Clinton. However, he won an overwhelming victory in the electoral college. The electoral college is itself an undemocratic hangover from when the plantation economy dependent on the slave labor of kidnapped Africans and their descendants dominated the southern U.S. This would be as though the Labour Party in Britain won a small but definite majority in the House of Commons but the House of Lords and the Crown—both survivors of the time when a feudal economy dominated what is now Great Britain—combined to install a prime minister from the Tory Party.

Hail to the Chief!

The big capitalists know full well that, whether or not they like a particular “leader of the free world,” they have only one such leader at a time. Immediately after the proclamation of Trump as “president-elect,” outgoing President Barack Obama wished Trump success. He explained that, whatever differences there might be between the first African American to be elected to the presidency and his right-wing racist successor, “we”—the ruling capitalist class—are “playing on the same team.”

Obama is correct. Hillary Clinton after a lag of a few hours—reports said that she had not even considered the possibility that she would lose and had not prepared a concession speech—delivered a meek statement along the same lines.

Ironically, Trump had declared in the weeks leading up to the election that “the system is rigged” and he might not accept the results. This indicated that Trump himself did not actually expect to win. Whether Trump would have recognized a Clinton victory as legitimate and indicated his support of a President Hillary Clinton will never be known.

The selection of Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama for U.S. attorney-general indicates that the Trump administration will be the most racist administration since at least the days of Woodrow Wilson. Ronald Reagan nominated Sessions for a federal judgeship, but his racism was too obvious and he was rejected by the Senate. Sessions called African American employees of the Justice Department “boy”—the term of address used by white slaveholders when addressing their African male slaves. Later, in the Jim Crow era, white bosses, officialdom and racist whites would address African American men as “boy.”

Sessions once joked that he had no arguments with the Ku Klux Klan until he found out that Klan members used marijuana. The point of this joke is that Sessions, though he disapproves of weed, has no disagreements with the Klan on the question of race. This joke is beyond offensive and in a decent society would disqualify him for any public office, let alone the position as chief law-enforcement officer. The Sessions nomination gives the lie to any claim that the president-elect is not a racist.

Trump appointed Steve Bannon as White House chief advisor and strategist. Bannon, the former chief executive officer of Breitbart “News,” a far-right website that has provided a platform for the neo-Nazi-ridden alt-right movement, has sent chills down the spines of all American who do not fit the white-nationalist definition of European Americans. As defined by neo-Nazis—or white nationalists, as they like to call themselves today—non-European Americans include the African American community; Latinos, especially but not only the Mexican community; Native Americans; the entire Muslim community and, yes, that other group not considered to be European American, the Jewish community.

Not so long ago, the complacent mainstream leaders of the U.S. Jewish community, who are all Zionists, claimed that anti-Semitism today came from the left. According to these misleaders, anti-Semitism showed itself in the form of the Boycott and Divestment and Black Lives Matter movements because the leaders of these movements expressed solidarity with the struggle of the Palestinian people against Israeli apartheid.

But then a funny thing happened. The old anti-Semitism of “the right”—that is, the real thing—is now raising its ugly head not only in far-off Poland, Hungary and Hitler’s homeland of Austria but right here in the U.S. Recently, the Anti-Defamation League denounced the attacks on Muslims. This is a welcome development though it would be nice if they extended their defense of Muslims to Arab Muslims who are native to Palestine. This illustrates the fact that the state of Israel and the entire Zionist movement are actually barriers in the struggle against fascism and the real anti-Semitism that inevitably accompanies it.

For reasons I explained in an earlier post, the bipartisan Democratic-Republican leadership of the U.S. ruling class finds the prospect of Donald Trump as U.S. president unacceptable. When the conventions were held in July, polls showed a Trump victory was not out of the question. Indeed, for a brief time in July, after the Republican convention but before the Democratic convention, Trump had a modest lead in the polls against Hillary Clinton.

The media, including media that normally support the Republican Party, then launched a campaign of ridicule against Trump. Trump has even been pictured as an agent of Russian President Vladimir Putin. In the wake of this media campaign, Trump plunged in the polls. Most recent polls show Trump rebounding but still trailing Clinton and some show Trump closing the gap.

In the course of his campaign, Trump has managed to insult or otherwise alienate huge sections of the U.S. voting population. These include African-Americans; Latinos; Muslims of all nationalities, or people who “look” Muslim; Native Americans; anybody else who doesn’t look “white”; and Jews. Trump is also extremely unpopular among many female voters, who represent around half the vote. Polls show that among African-Americans Trump has the support of maybe 1 percent, at most 2 percent, of the African-American population. This is an all-time low for any Democratic or Republican presidential candidate. There was a time when the “Party of Lincoln” got the majority of the African-American vote. In recent years, however, only 4 to 6 percent of African-Americans have voted Republican. Trump has managed to whittle this down further.

Trump is extremely unpopular among younger voters, or “millennials” as they have been dubbed. Never since modern polling began has a candidate of either the Democratic or Republican party polled so poorly among young people of all “races” and genders—who represent the future. This is in contrast to Adolf Hitler during his rise to power, who was particularly popular among the non-working class German youth. The Nazis captured the campuses even before they captured the streets and then the government.

If Hitler had alienated as much of the German population as Trump has managed to do, nobody would recognize his name today. Due to the U.S. empire’s advanced and growing state of decay, fascism remains a growing long-term threat. The Trump campaign has given a boost to those in the U.S. who are trying to build a genuine fascist movement. This development should not be taken lightly. However, the victory of fascism in the world’s dominant imperialist country is not imminent. If fascism some day comes to power in the U.S., it is hardly likely that now 70-year-old Trump will be its leader.

Though a Trump victory in November cannot be excluded at this time, it is likely that the world will have to deal with an extremely hawkish Hillary Clinton, who by all indications favors a more aggressive Bush-like foreign policy than that associated with President Obama.

Not that Obama’s foreign policy has been exactly “peaceful.” However, Obama has tried to avoid large-scale combat on the ground, limiting himself to using “special forces” numbered in the dozens or hundreds. Instead, he has made heavy use of drones combined with conventional bombers in Libya, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and other war theaters. The administration, fearing revived anti-war demonstrations in the streets, has done everything it can to fight its wars with minimal casualties
among U.S. forces.

It should be noted, however, that Obama did not keep his promise to end the war in Afghanistan. After a hundred thousand troops deployed to this war front failed to crush the Afghan resistance forces, Obama agreed to keep a U.S. ground force of around 10,000, combined with bombing using both drones and conventional bombers. This campaign is now set to continue indefinitely.

While Obama rejected the bombing of Syrian government forces, he later opened a bombing campaign in Syria against the Islamic State. The administration has now sent special forces into northern Syria to help Kurdish rebels trying to establish a Kurdish state in opposition to the Syrian government of President Assad—bringing the U.S. closer to open warfare with that government.

Under the more hawkish Hillary Clinton, chances of the commitment of large-scale ground combat forces in the Middle East, Africa or even Ukraine or other areas near Russia will, all else remaining equal, increase. And the increased warfare that Hillary Clinton is indicating she will bring can only, in the long run, strengthen the fascist forces that have been rallying around the Trump campaign in this electoral cycle. A Hillary Clinton victory in November will therefore in no way be a victory in the struggle against the growing danger of U.S. fascism.\

These observations are not meant to be exhaustive. To write an exhaustive analysis of the just-held conventions of the two ruling parties of U.S. capitalism would take up far too much space and take us too far afield from the main subject of the blog, the theory of capitalist crises. In this post, however, I will make some observations on how the economic decline of U.S. capitalism was reflected in the recently held conventions and provide some historical perspective.

Donald Trump becomes official GOP nominee

There were last-ditch attempts by anti-Trump neo-liberal right-wingers to deny Trump the nomination by freeing up the Republican delegates so they could “vote their conscience” and nominate a more acceptable—to Wall Street—Republican. Among those widely mentioned as alternatives were the union-busting Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and Tea Party supporter Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. But pro-Trump forces handily defeated the “anybody but Trump” movement at the convention, and the New York billionaire racist and reality TV star was duly nominated to run for president of the United States.

Trump chose as his running mate Indiana Governor and Tea Party darling John Pence. This was seen as a gesture to the more traditional neo-liberal right wing of the party. The Tea Party faction strongly supports neo-liberal economics and is thus far more acceptable to Wall Street than is Trump with his pseudo-populist and protectionist demagoguery. The high point—if it can be called that—of the Republican convention was when Senator Ted Cruz addressed the convention delegates but failed to endorse Trump. When it became clear that Cruz was not going to endorse Trump, he was loudly booed.

Media polls taken after the Republican convention showed Trump for the first time with a modest but very real lead over Hillary Clinton. Though it is normal for the Republican and Democratic candidates to have a lead right after their respective conventions, Trump has been increasingly ridiculed in the media ever since it became likely that he would be the Republican nominee. After the Democratic convention, new polls showed Clinton had regained the lead, which indeed is in line with the normal pattern. But Clinton’s lead is not a commanding one, despite the non-stop and escalating anti-Trump propaganda campaign in the media.

One of the reasons Trump is doing as well as he is, despite the opposition of the traditional media, is his use of social media, especially Twitter. The polls show that a Trump upset victory is not yet beyond the range of possibility in November, especially if new scandals hit Hillary Clinton or there is a surprise financial crisis and recession.

As a result, the media campaign against Trump escalated, with articles appearing that suggest that Trump may actually be clinically insane. This goes far beyond the normal mudslinging that occurs during U.S. presidential elections. The Washington Post, one of the leading organs of U.S. imperialism, even ran a special editorial declaring that Trump is a threat to the republic and completely unacceptable as U.S. president.

Cruz is not the only leading Republican to refuse to endorse Trump. A significant section of the Republican leadership has as well, including both George Bush senior and junior. The failure of two ex-President Bushes to endorse Trump, considering the realities of the U.S. two-party system, is in effect a backhanded endorsement of his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. The Koch brothers’ family of industrial capitalists, staunch Republicans with extreme right-wing neo-liberal views, have also refused to endorse Trump. This also amounts to a backhanded endorsement of Clinton.

The former billionaire Republican Mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg, who owns Bloomberg News, which covers the stock market and other financial markets, has not only endorsed Hillary Clinton but went so far as to speak at the Democratic convention. Even the ghosts of ultra-right Senator Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan were summoned up from the nether world to denounce Trump. Both Goldwater’s widow and Ronald Reagan’s son claimed that neither Goldwater nor Reagan would have supported Trump if they were alive.

The Democratic convention that officially nominated Hillary Clinton was held appropriately in a hall named after the giant Wells Fargo Bank, one of the most powerful banks in the U.S. Considering the large numbers of Republicans who are either openly endorsing her or giving her bi-partisan support if she wins in November, Clinton will not only be the first female president—itself a sign of social progress—but the most “bipartisan president” since George Washington.

It was also revealed just before the convention that William Kristol and George Wills, major Republican intellectuals, have dropped their registration in the Republican Party and have re-registered “independent.” This indicates that these major figures, not themselves “electoral politicians” but rather “opinion makers” and right-wing political thinkers for the U.S. ruling class, foresee a major reshuffling of the two-party system in the very near future. They are keeping their options open on which party they will identify with in coming years. Will they return to a “post-Trump” Republican Party, become supporters of the Democratic Party, or participate in creating a new right-wing party based on the neo-liberal” principles so dear to them?

During the week leading up to the June 23 Brexit referendum, media representing the largest capitalists that benefit from the U.S.-dominated world empire pulled all the tricks out their bag to ensure that the proposal for Britain to leave the European Union was defeated. They claimed that Brexit would bring financial panic and a deep new world recession that would otherwise be avoided.

The leaders of all the major parties in Britain, including the Conservative leader and prime minister David Cameron, Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn, who was lukewarm in his opposition to Brexit, and the leadership of the liberal Social-Democratic Party, were united on their opposition to Brexit. Only the far-right racist United Kingdom Independence Party and a few small leftist groups supported it.

What was the Brexit vote about?

The Brexit movement was dominated by the racist anti-immigrant right with neo-fascist components, much like the Trump campaign is in the United States. There was a much smaller left-wing movement that also favored Brexit. The problem was there was no way to distinguish between votes for anti-immigrant, racist Brexit and the leftish “lexit” movement.

Unfortunately, there are many on the left who echo Brexit by explaining that there has to be some limit on immigration, since otherwise wages in Britain and other “white” European countries will plummet. Such people are not thinking like working-class revolutionaries but like bourgeois trade unionists who want to assure high wages for “our British Workers” at the expense of “foreign workers” who are not “white” or are from Poland. (Polish workers in Britain these days do not qualify as “white.”)

Voters were given two choices. One was to vote for the British nationalist “Trumpist” movement’s position based on nostalgia for the days when “Britannia ruled” and everybody in Britain was English, Welsh, Scottish, or “at worst” Irish, and there were many relatively good paying jobs in industry and mining. In bygone days in industrial Britain, the high demand for the commodity labor power made it possible to organize powerful trade unions that limited the competition among the sellers of that commodity, resulting in relatively high wages for British workers.

The other choice was to vote for the order that has “given the world 70 years of peace”—among the imperialist robber countries, that is—but has also led to the progressive decay of the industrial economies of the imperialist core countries—especially Britain. In U.S. terms, it was comparable to voting for Hillary Clinton—the status-quo presidential candidate—or the anti-immigrant, racist, fascist-infested Donald Trump candidacy.

As the day of the vote approached, the “establishment” prepared to celebrate. Polls under the weight of the media campaign were shifting toward the “anti-Brexit” position. The assassination of Jo Cox, a strong Brexit opponent and Labor MP, by a neo-Nazi a short time before the referendum seemed to put wind in the sails of the anti-Brexit camp. In anticipation of another great victory for the “pro-European Union position”—which really means pro-U.S. world empire—world stock markets climbed relentlessly while U.S. government bonds and the dollar price of gold slumped.

Or, as the financial press likes to say, with Brexit headed for defeat the appetite for risk was increasing. The defeat of Brexit in Britain would then signal the coming victory of the pro-status quo, conservative Hillary Clinton in the November U.S. presidential election over her anti-immigrant, nationalist-racist challenger Donald Trump.

Just before the polls closed, the media reported that a last-minute poll showed a further swing toward the anti-Brexit position. It was, it seemed, a done deal, and the anti-Brexit supporters prepared to celebrate their great victory! But that was before the votes began to be counted. As the returns came in, the mood of victory among the conservative supporters of the status quo turned to horror. Against all expectations, Brexit was victorious at the polls.

What happened? It seems that many young people—comparable to Bernie Sanders supporters in the U.S., though they most certainly didn’t support the racist Brexit campaign—couldn’t get themselves to vote for the status quo by voting against Brexit. Many of these young people disgusted with what was being offered to them by both the pro- and anti-Brexit positions simply stayed home. Could something like that happen in November in the U.S. causing the election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency?

Much to the relief of the U.S. ruling class, Wall Street favorite Hillary Clinton defeated Senator Bernie Sanders in the June 7 California primary. In the wake of Clinton’s victory, President Obama formally endorsed Clinton for the office of president of the United States, as did the “progressive” Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, considered a major leader on the left wing of the Democratic Party.

This makes it all but official that the Democratic nominee will be the pro-corporate, pro-Wall Street, and very hawkish former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, wife of former President Bill Clinton. Clinton will be the first female to be nominated by one of the two ruling parties to the presidency and if elected will be the first female president of the U.S.

The media made it appear that Clinton won by an unexpectedly large margin, though Sanders got more than 40 percent of the vote. Before the election, most polls had shown Clinton well ahead of Sanders. But that was before Sanders staged a series of rallies that drew thousands of enthusiastic young people, in sharp contrast to the tepid support for Clinton. Clinton’s lead in the polls began to evaporate and it looked as though Sanders might have the momentum to pull off an upset in California like he had done earlier in Michigan and some other states.

In the end, Clinton prevailed frustrating the hopes of Sanders’ newly politicized young supporters. One factor was that on the eve of the California primary, the Associated Press, quickly echoed by other media, announced that Clinton had clinched the Democratic nomination. In reality, Clinton lacked, and still lacks despite her victory in the California primary, enough elected delegates to win the Democratic nomination. However, she is assured of the great majority of the unelected “super-delegates.” Indeed, weeks before the AP announcement it had become clear that Clinton would almost certainly be the Democratic nominee thanks to the un-elected super-delegates.

Sanders had kept alive the hope among his young supporters that he would be able to convince the super-delegates to shift their support to him, but this never seemed likely. However, it would have been far more costly politically for the Democratic establishment if Clinton had been nominated after losing the primary in the U.S.’s biggest state. The timing of the AP announcement just before the election had all the markings of a corporate move to save Clinton from an embarrassing loss.

There were other factors in Clinton’s victory. Under the bizarre electoral rules of California’s so-called open primary system, persons can vote in the primaries regardless of their stated political party preference. However, this rule does not apply to the office of U.S. president. Who exactly can vote in the presidential primary is different for the Democratic Party than for the Republican Party.

Only registered Republicans can vote in the Republican presidential primary. However, in the Democratic primary it is possible for persons registered as neither Democrats nor Republicans to request a special ballot that enables them to vote in the Democratic presidential primary. Of course, many young people—and indeed even older people—were awakened to politics for the first time by the Sanders campaign and were not registered Democrat. They simply didn’t know that they could actually vote in the Democratic primary for the office of president. Or even if they did know this, they might not have known where or how they could obtain the special ballot. This undoubtedly cost Sanders many votes.

In addition, many poor people have felony convictions. Convicted felons who have passed their probation are “out of the system” and under California law can vote in elections. But many such people believe that once you are convicted of a felony you can never vote again—which is indeed the case in some U.S. states.

Yet another factor that tends to depress the votes of anybody who has to work for a living is that U.S. elections are held on a working day. In virtually every other country, elections are held on holidays or weekends giving voters several days to vote. To be sure, in the California primary people did have the possibility of voting by mail, but to do this you had to be signed up beforehand. It is also possible to vote at a polling place, but you have to know where to go to vote if you follow this route, and there are often long lines.

All these factors work strongly in favor of corporate-backed machine candidates such as Hillary Clinton. These machine voters know their polling places or are signed up to vote by mail.

Perhaps most important was the alliance between the leaders of trade unions, including unions made up mostly of immigrant low-wage workers, and the Democratic Party machine. This close alliance between trade-union leaders and the corporate-backed Democrats, now led by Hillary Clinton, dates back to New Deal days. If the union leaders had backed Sanders (1), the result would have been quite different. This illustrates the truth, if in this case negatively, that in present-day capitalist society no major progressive social and political change can happen without the support of the organized working class.

Clinton’s victory, however, does not change the fact that about 40 percent of those who voted in the Democratic Party, and far more than half of the younger voters, preferred the avowed “democratic socialist” to the pro-corporate, pro-war Hillary Clinton.

While Sanders and Clinton were campaigning in California, Donald Trump actively campaigned up and down the state as though he, too, was in a tight race. In reality, Trump faced no opposition in the California Republican primary. Indeed, Trump’s last standing opponents, Ohio Governor John Kasick and Texas Senator Ted Cruz, had withdrawn from the race weeks before. Nor is the racist Trump given a realistic chance of winning the state in the general election where white people are a minority and Latinos are now the largest single ethnic group.

Therefore, unlike the case with Clinton and Sanders, Trump should have had no real interest in the California primary if we judge by normal electoral criteria. What then was Trump up to in California?

A few months ago, I watched an Internet video that explored the attitudes of Americans toward present-day Germany. Germany has a history of at least a thousand years, going back to the medieval Holy Roman Empire. However, movies and TV shows Americans are exposed to focus only on Nazi Germany. Indeed, the popular U.S. entertainment media focus even more narrowly on the years 1944-1945, when heroic American soldiers defeated German Nazis alternatively shown as evil, comic or stupid.

This particular video showed a modern young German woman visiting the U.S. and meeting a young man. The American man, whose education in German history is of the type described above, asked the German woman whether her grandfather had been a Nazi. The German woman put the young man in his place by asking whether his ancestors had been slave owners. And herein lies a tale.

Today in Germany, with the exception of neo-Nazis, nobody honors the Nazis. There are no Adolf Hitler Platz’s and no cities or buildings named for Hitler or other Nazi leaders. Herman Goering’s prediction to his jailers at Nuremberg that in 50 years there would be statues of Hitler throughout Germany did not come true.

Perhaps textbooks in modern Germany don’t explore the deeper roots of what made the Nazis and their crimes possible. That would require an understanding of the imperialism that gave birth to the Nazis and the capitalism that inevitably developed into imperialism. And since Germany remains a capitalist as well as an imperialist country—all of Germany has been ruled by capitalists since 1989—it is unlikely that German textbooks would explain the contradictions of capitalism that made Nazism possible in the first place. But at least the Nazis are pictured as the band of criminals they were.

But what about the U.S. slaveholders and their “slaveholders’ rebellion” of 1861-1865, as it was called by Karl Marx? That rebellion—which formed the Confederate States of America—is pretty much viewed around the world as at least the moral equivalent of the Third Reich. Not identical to the Third Reich but no less evil.

It is not only left-of-center progressives who see it that way. Today’s fascists also see it that way. At fascist meetings throughout the world, the swastika, or symbols that look like the swastika, are displayed side by side with the stripes and bars of the Confederacy, the flag of slavery.

Are the leaders of the slaveholders’ rebellion in U.S. textbooks described as the band of criminals they were, like the Nazis are pictured in German textbooks? Not at all. The leaders of the slaveholders’ rebellion are generally pictured as honorable leaders of a “lost cause”—and as great American patriots—though the emphasis has shifted over the years reflecting the flows and ebbs of the struggle for African American liberation.

For example, in the years immediately after the war ended, it was called the “war of the rebellion.” But soon after, it was renamed the Civil War, a polite and neutral term that makes no distinction between those who fought and in many cases died in the war against the slaveholders’ rebellion and those who fought on the side of the slave owners.